Victor Davis Hanson

Facing a free-wheeling Trump, she is weighted down by tons of baggage.

This year was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s “turn,” after her humiliating loss in 2008 to Barack Obama. She has paid her dues as secretary of state for Obama. And the apparent Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, is written off by most pundits as a buffoon without a chance in the general election. Yet, Clinton’s campaign continues to be dismal, and is getting worse — to the point where the socialist Bernie Sanders polls better against Trump than does Hillary Clinton. How can that be?

At least eight reasons come to mind — several of them relating to Clinton’s innate character flaws and past scandals.

1) The E-Mail Scandal Although the FBI has not finished its investigation and sent its results and recommendations to the Obama Justice Department, most of the media and public have learned enough about the e-mail/server scandal to conclude that had any mid-level State Department or intelligence-agency employee emulated Hillary Clinton’s use of a private unsecured server — along with serial denials and lying about such use — he would have been fired and prosecuted.

Hillary’s exemption so far hinges entirely on the fact that she is the Democratic party’s only viable presidential candidate; her indictment would send the party into crisis, given that the committed socialist Bernie Sanders would be the most deserving to inherit the nomination. So her Sword of Damocles swings with public opinion. What keeps Hillary out of jail, or at least a plea-bargain, is her political viability, first as the likely Democratic nominee, and second as a presumable winner over Trump. But take either likelihood away, and she de facto loses exemption and becomes expendable — a fact that is well known to her and which cannot be an easy reality to face each morning. She is beginning to resemble a Third World caudilla who knows that the minute she loses power, so too she loses her head.

2) The Clinton Cash Shakedowns The Clintons left the White House broke, by their own admission, in 2001 and are now worth well over $100 million — lucre apparently predicated on the degree to which corporations and foreign governments believed that the phoenix-like couple would once again return to power, and would remain true to character as punishers of non-contributors and abettors of donors. The couple founded the Clinton Foundation as a quid-pro-quo money-laundering enterprise designed to sell influence for cash and to keep Clinton, Inc., hangers-on and employees viable in between Clinton presidential runs.
The key to the Ponzi scheme was that unlike Carter, Reagan, or the Bushes, the Clinton couple could dangle the idea that Bill was not term-limited by his eight years but could become reincarnated for another two terms under Hillary’s aegis — thus transforming what should have been an emeritus president into a retread with regenerative power to use the office to help or hurt the rich. It would require a suspension of disbelief to assume that companies or foreign governments gave millions of dollars to the Clinton initiative because they wished to help the poor and the sick.

All benefactors knew that they were investing in influence, and the Clintons were selling it to the highest bidder in a way never true of any other presidential foundation. Never mind that such coziness with Big Money was antithetical to the progressive pretensions of the Democratic party and the Clintons’ own populist veneer. Each day over the next six months that there is a disclosure about yet another duplicitous donor or yet another pay-to-play scheme, so each day confidence in Hillary’s honesty and integrity erodes further.

3) Our First Female President Hillary Clinton envisioned her candidacy as a trailblazing presidential precedent in the same way that Obama parlayed his racial ancestry into broad support in 2008. Clinton’s candidacy was to be in antithesis to Trump’s “war on women” crudity. But 2016 is not 1999, and Hillary is being hoist on her own petard by pandering to the new campus ethos that to accuse a man of sexual assault is to convict him — and that to stand by without vocal support for the accuser is an even worse sin. By her own new standards, then, her husband’s goatishness and her enabling of his sometimes coercive sexual behavior prove both guilty in the court of 21st-century gender jurisprudence.

In short, Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and Kathleen Willey have all dulled the blade of Trump as crude sexist — and have nearly made Hillary’s own trailblazing gender card irrelevant. Unlike Trump’s ego-driven womanizing, which he crassly bragged about, Bill Clinton’s was covered up. And the Clintons reduced women who claimed that they were assaulted to the status of “bimbo,” “floozy,” and “stalker” — or, in the never-retracted words of media darling James Carville, “If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”

snip

for the rest of the points:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/43...tering-campaign

Quote: algernonpj wrote in post #3

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Quote: Cincinnatus wrote in post #2

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Today's news is not going to help her candidacy.

Zitat

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WASHINGTON—The State Department’s independent watchdog has concluded that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and months of missing records from her tenure were violations of State Department policies and practices, a rebuke of the presidential candidate’s time as secretary of State.

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This is the State Department investigating on of its own, its top honcho to be exact. They aren't going to make recommendations beyond their scope

Zitat

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In a long-awaited report released to Congress on Wednesday, the State Department’s Office of Inspector General faulted Mrs. Clinton and her predecessors for “long-standing” failures in record-keeping and cybersecurity efforts. The report was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The report contradicts Mrs. Clinton’s argument that her exclusive use of a private email server while running the State Department was permitted—an issue that has roiled her presidential bid since being revealed last year.

“Department employees must use agency-authorized information systems to conduct normal day-to-day operations because the use of non- Departmental systems creates significant security risks,” the report concludes.

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Really, the language is mild but the report is damning! The report contradicts all of her "claims" as false!!!!


[
The report makes no recommendation that Mrs. Clinton or any other secretary of State be investigated or punished. But it is a warning to other senior department officials not to use personal email for government business.

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algernonpj:
Warning not to use personal email for government business or what ???

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As far as this State Dept report goes, it is damning!!! This is only one piece from a friendly source. Leave it to the FBI to connect these horrible dots [enter Guccifer] and the voters! to give her LOW GRADES for her terrible judgment on matters of National Security. This selfishness is really incomprehensible! TM